1 posts from July 1994

Thursday, July 07, 1994

As wrenching as this is for a newspaper columnist to admit, I've come to suspect in the last several days that I may not be supremely qualified to issue ringing pronouncements on the "Baby Richard" case.

I viewed the issue as the parent of a preschooler myself, a boy roughly a year older than the 3 1/2-year-old at the center of a legal dispute between his biological and adoptive parents. I simply asked myself: How would we have felt if, last summer, the courts had ordered us to turn our son over forever to another family? And how would our son have felt, or how would I have felt at his age, to be torn from the only mother and father he has ever known?

Devastated doesn't even say it. And by projecting that feeling onto the Baby Richard case-in which the Illinois Supreme Court has ordered the boy's adoptive parents to turn him over to his biological parents-I had the gut reaction now shared by many in this state: Forget about the quibbling adults; set aside the legal blather. Don't traumatize the boy by taking him out of a home where he is now healthy and happy.

I included this viewpoint in my Tuesday column and received objections from a source that surprised me: adults who had been adopted as children.

In voice-mail messages and follow-up phone calls-occasionally angry or tearful, always thoughtful-they pointed out that those of us non-adoptees who believe that it is in "the best interests of the child" for Richard to stay where he is are taking a short-term view of what his "interests" are. We are not, they said, taking into account the enduring power and importance of biological ties, ties we take for granted.

"It's hard for others to understand," said Grace Zaranti, 43, a Blue Island psychologist who is both an adoptive mother and an adoptee. "But when you're adopted, you go through life with a missing piece to your puzzle. At some level, you don't know who you are."

"I had an idyllic childhood with my adoptive parents, but I always felt there was a hole inside me," added a 35-year-old Park Ridge woman who didn't want her name used. "It was low-ebb kind of grief and anger-why didn't my natural mother and father want me?"

Sue Martin of Wilmette, whose husband and adult son are both adoptees, put it bluntly: "Nobody would choose to be adopted," she said. "It's not a wished-for state. Where there is a safe, natural family, that's the best place for every child."

Martin is area co-leader of Truth Seekers in Adoption, which helps adult adoptees find their natural parents and lobbies for open adoption records. One might expect adoptees to side with adoptive parents like their own. But many I spoke to on this subject were passionate about natural ties. Martin and others made reference to "the primal wound," a trendy term that refers to the anguish some say infants inevitably experience when they are separated from their birth mothers and put up for adoption.

"There's anger and hurt and grief," said Bonnie Romanow, 40, an Evanston schoolteacher and adoptee. "It all has to be reckoned with. The (natural) bond goes beyond nurture, beyond environment. It's much deeper."

In the short term, said Zaranti, there is no question that Richard will suffer intense feelings of loss and abandonment should he be separated from the only family he has known. And it is these feelings, this pain, that most in the general public can identify with and want, almost instinctively, to spare him.

But most of us have no vantage point for a longer view. As non-adoptees, we are strangers to the long-term pain the adoptees suggested Richard is likely to endure in adolescence and adulthood, knowing not only that he was adopted but that his adoptive parents fought to keep him from a natural, if less-than-perfect, mother and father who had desperately wanted him back since he was 2 months old.

It is the mysterious but powerful bonds of blood-not conflicting claims about which adults have which rights when-that makes the Baby Richard case more complicated and more subtle than it seems, and certainly more complicated than it seemed to me when I first applied my experience and prejudices to it.

Do the views of this unscientific sample of adult adoptees represent the view of all or even most adoptees? I make no such claim. I claim only that it will offer you more to listen to them than to the distracting rhythms of your own generous and caring heart. Or mine.

About "Change of Subject."

"Change of Subject" by Chicago Tribune op-ed columnist Eric Zorn contains observations, reports, tips, referrals and tirades, though not necessarily in that order. Links will tend to expire, so seize the day. For an archive of Zorn's latest Tribune columns click here. An explanation of the title of this blog is here. If you have other questions, suggestions or comments, send e-mail to ericzorn at gmail.com.
More about Eric Zorn

Contributing editor Jessica Reynolds is a 2012 graduate of Loyola University Chicago and is the coordinator of the Tribune's editorial board. She can be reached at jreynolds at tribune.com.